It seems to be review time for amaroK. The amaroK team is thrilled to see amaroK way ahead of the pack in a recent Grumpy Editor review on LWN.net, in which the author describes the best and worst features of four popular Free Software audio players. The review points out some of the weaker features of amaroK and the developers have written about how they are addressing some of the issues mentioned. amaroK has also had an audio review on the GNU/Linux User Show No. 27. The author describes most of amaroK's features and shows once again that the slogan "rediscover your music" fits perfectly. You download the review at their website, or by adding the podcast to amaroK.

Years ago everyone hyped the hell out of Rhythmbox to be the best show that GNOME had to offer and then internal disagreement made the development came to an halt. Rhythmbox was nowhere usable, it was and still is just a simple window infront of a playing engine where you can click 'play' and 'stop'. No real feedback to the user was given, what's playing, duration and so on. Not to mention that Rhythmbox was by far to immature to be anything worth while.

Then from one day to another everyone came up with his own Rhythmbox like player in GNOME (as it is a common thing that as soon someone starts something, everyone else starts to clone the thing or do the same). Now there is Banshee, Muine, Rhythmbox, Net-Rhythmbox and even that thing from Immendio and all the other players that exists.

GNOME ends up in having half a dozen half finished media players.

Then one day the amaroK people have shown up, totally focusing and concentrating on creating a good media player for KDE (imo the best one existing so far) and it has passed all the crap that GNOME initially wrote.

And still people do mention RB and Banshee (MONO) to compare with things like amaroK. Imo even XMMS is far ahead of RB in many areas.

Hey, it's not just Gnome users that favor Juk, I love Juk because it does one thing very well, play music. You start Juk up and within seconds you understand the interface, there was almost zero learning curve for me. I never feel comfortable using Amarok. Regardless, congrats to the Amarok team.

What annoys me the most is that I play song a in player a and then start a song b which is then opened in player b just because it is a different format and player b is the default player, but player a does not stop to play song a but. So I have to listen to a song a and b mix.

Unless I've done something seriously wrong to retard its functionality (and I haven't altered it at all) NoAtun might be better forgotten. Every time it opened (it was the default player for most video formats in my distro) there were issues that caused me to kill it immediately:

1)The video was jumping like a kid who's just realized the powdered sugar on his doughnut is cocaine.

2)The audio wasn't even vaguely synced with the video.

3)Somewhere in the combination of bad video and bad audio it lagged my system so that closing the windows (at least 4 of them, there's another thing!) took much longer than it should have.

(Once its' libraries are updated from their crippled SuSE defaults) I'll take Xine any day.

While AmaroK might be almost flawless to some folks, I find that those that decide to include GStreamer as the default engine with its limitations, do AmaroK nothing good. You might ask; why? Because GStreamer does not play streaming media on all systems I have tried, and it's also slow. (A bug report was filed long ago).

When one attempts to play any streaming media with GStreamer as the backend, AmaroK buffers up to 100% and then re-buffers on and on and on. It never stops! To get around this, I have always downloaded and installed Xine from source, then compiled and installed Amarok from source too. This way, Amarok recognizes the xine engine and enables me to play streaming media like radio stations.

The default backend since 1.3 (I think) has been Xine, ever since it gained a stable crossfading capability. (Incidentally, afterwards the GStreamer engine was rewritten without the crossfading capability, as it was causing too many stability issues.)
Many distros (Kubuntu e.g., don't know about the rest) set GStreamer as the default, however.

(I don't think there's that big of a difference between the two, myself -- Xine has crossfading, very slightly lower CPU usage, and skips a bit less under high load, but otherwise they both work pretty solidly these days, in my experience.)

Not only streaming media, when I installed amaroK (don't know if it was 1.2.x or already 1.3.x) it was obviously defaulting to gstreamer. I realized that soon when I played certain mp3 files (nothing special about them) and it sounded as if gstreamer was eating them, while munching and burping. Occured on several different mp3s. I didn't want to test them all through, so I just changed to Xine which I knew was working previously and it had no problems with these files. So I'm glad there's stuff out there which is actually reliable.

KDE has always done well by choosing the best tools for the job. In this case, Xine comprehensively beats Gstreamer in terms of robustness, speed and effectiveness. That is why Xine should be the default media backend for KDE4.

If the GNOME'rs have the same sense, they too will default to Xine... hell, it seems like most of their users are, if not the developers :)

There won't be a thing such as a "default" media backend for KDE 4 regardless of how long people keep rambling about this stuff (there was a lesson to be learned about the current aRTs fiasco after all).

Exactly, KDE 4 will be compilable without any media backend as well (something which with KDE 3.x isn't possible due to the hard dependency on aRTs in kdelibs even if you don't intend to actually use it at all).

amarok in kde 4 will not just default to, but most probably ONLY support KDEMM. And kdeMM in turn will support every backend you want. but the choice will be out of amarok's hands, and most probably global for KDE.

If your distro patches amaroK to use by default a (suposedly, I haven't used it yet) broken sound engine, then your distro is broken too. Bug them to use xine engine by default, so it doesn't give amaroK a bad name.

Bad experience with gstreamer on FreeBSD as well - and they don't patch it to be the default. Lack of crossfading is one thing, but it is also unstable. Xine is OK, but I experience occasional crashes (hardly reproducible, for they occur randomly). So far, the most stable backend for me was arts, and it supports crossfading (and that's all I need).

That is hardly surprising considering it is "the grumpy editors guide" ;)

Lwn.net is IMHO one of the best Linux/open source magazine that exists. Week after week Corbet produces new articles of very high quality and I highly recommend becomming a subscriber if you want to follow what's going in the kernel land, his coverage is quite impressive.

> * Adding new files to the lib via drag and drop
amaroK adds them automatically if the file is in the search path, and I personally don't see a reason why one would have a file in the database which can't be in a search path as well :|

> * burn your playlist like in iTunes
I don't use iTunes, but it probably doesn't export the playlist for burning to the awesome K3b burning interface with integrated ultra-fantastic media support ;-)

> * podcast abo
hm, can you describe where iTunes got and advantage there? Could be right, since podcast are meant for iPods->apple->iTunes at their nascency

> * format conversion to .ogg
for that we got scripts

> * usability of freedb edit window
wtf is a "freedb edit window"? since when does amaroK use freedb at all? maybe mixed something up?

> * mpeg 4 audio is always opened with Kaffeine
as long as the file is spec compatible it gets opened with amaroK

> * visualisation
I totally agree with you

> * mp3 player which is mounted as a memory stick is not recognized.
we're working on

But well, as we see one needs 2 apps to get enough advantages for a post ;-) (don't take this too serious)

you might want to check out kaudiocreator which does importing of CDs pretty nicely. In KDE we have different tools for different tasks so those tools can specialize more. Maybe Amarok should provide an entry in the menus for ripping the cd if kaudiocreator is available, though...

What I don't understand is why kaudiocreator even exists, when you can just browser your audio cd and "copy" the ogg or mp3 (or even flac) directory from it via drag and drop.

Ironically, I learned of this feature from an OS X user's review of kde (3.3.x I think). This should be in kandalf's tips, or another very prominent place, for you can hardly think of any approach to ripping that would be more user-friendly. Non-technical users have no concepts of various formats (audio, wav, pcm, ogg, whatever), they just want to "copy" the mp3 off their audio cd, and that is exactly what konqi supports :)

Totally agree ... although if some media player would be able to catalogize and file OGG files into appropriate directories as well, it would be totally awesome (I could do the last one with JuK, but if doesn't rip CD and I use amaroK anyway).